Companies claiming they got hacked and lost your coins sounds like fraud so perfect it could be called fashionable. I never believe them. If I ever experience the misfortune of a real intrusion, I declare I have been honest about the way I have managed the keys in Casascius Coins. I maintain no ability to recover or reproduce the keys, not even under limitless duress or total intrusion. Remember that trusting strangers with your coins without any recourse is, as a matter of principle, not a best practice. Don't keep coins online. Use paper wallets instead.

Anyone know why all p2pool blocks seems to start with the payout address "Unknown: 0"? Perhaps people mining without adding any payout address?

Thanks much!

Looking at the block, it looks like something is intentionally being shoved in the coinbase for some other purpose. The size of the data looks like it's possibly a hash of something else, but otherwise it is an unredeemable transaction with a value of zero.

My guess, based on how I understand p2pool works, is it is likely the hash of the most recent block in the share chain, since the same block that makes it into Bitcoin also becomes a block in the share chain.

Companies claiming they got hacked and lost your coins sounds like fraud so perfect it could be called fashionable. I never believe them. If I ever experience the misfortune of a real intrusion, I declare I have been honest about the way I have managed the keys in Casascius Coins. I maintain no ability to recover or reproduce the keys, not even under limitless duress or total intrusion. Remember that trusting strangers with your coins without any recourse is, as a matter of principle, not a best practice. Don't keep coins online. Use paper wallets instead.